Abstract
Suggested citation for this article: Potter P. When at night I go to sleep / Fourteen angels watch do keep. Emerg Infect Dis [Internet]. 2013 Sep [date cited]. http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1909.AC1909 1From 19th-century German composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy opera Hansel and Gretel: www.fourteenangels.org/the-prayer.html
Highlights
Every year, on Whit Tuesday, pilgrims crowd the small town of Echternach, Luxembourg, to join a Dancing Procession, a tradition, legend has it, rooted in miraculous healings as far back as the 8th century at the site of Saint Willibrord’s sarcophagus
Willibrord became the patron saint of patients with neurologic diseases: paresis, epilepsy, and what was known as choreomania or the “dancing disease,” an epidemic of strange behavior of crowds
They would suddenly form circles and dance to exhaustion, “their limbs jerked and they collapsed snorting, unconscious and frothing.”. This epidemic of uncontrolled dancing spread throughout Germany and the Netherlands
Summary
On Whit Tuesday, pilgrims crowd the small town of Echternach, Luxembourg, to join a Dancing Procession, a tradition, legend has it, rooted in miraculous healings as far back as the 8th century at the site of Saint Willibrord’s sarcophagus. Willibrord became the patron saint of patients with neurologic diseases: paresis, epilepsy, and what was known as choreomania or the “dancing disease,” an epidemic of strange behavior of crowds. Felix Platter, in his Praxeos Medicae (1602), referred to Saint Vitus’ dance as “that frightening and remarkable
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